Book bit bullets III

I expected that the end of teaching would free up some time, but somehow before Kalamazoo I still have to finalise a paper for print, write another one for Kalamazoo itself, fend off my book’s editor with answers to a range of queries, apply for twoa jobs and stay employed in the current one. So content may be a bit thin here for a while. For the moment, therefore, I offer the tried and trusted bullets inspired by recent reading!

• I had not realised it from his later work on charters, but Hartmut Atsma when young appears to have been the German David Dumville, in as much as almost every section of a large part of his thesis printed in Francia for 1983 ends with a quick round-up of the ways other scholars, especially Friedrich Prinz, were wrong, specifically about the evidence for the early Church in Auxerre. “Es zeigt sich also, daß der von F. Prinz und R. Borius abgenommene kausale Nexus zwischen der Beeinflussung des Germanus durch das lerinensische Mönchtum und seiner Klostergründung nicht in einen plausibilen und durch die Quellen begründbaren chronologische Zusammenhang zu stellen ist.” So there!¹
• Also in that volume, apart from the edition of the Vita sancti Marcelli I mentioned last post and the excellent Jane Martindale article I actually got the volume out for, is a lengthy article by Hans-Werner Goetz about the ideology of the investiture controversy.² Meanwhile, in a different book that I had out for an excellent article by Jinty Nelson, I find another paper by Hans-Werner Goetz.³ The former is about fifty pages of elaborate German in a style I’ve mentioned here before, in which sentences take up four or five lines of print and contain eight clauses and at least four compound nouns I’ve never seen before; the latter is English, clear and only slightly literary, and is fourteen pages including tables, albeit that is on the long side for the volume. I’m not entirely sure there aren’t two Hans-Werner Goetzes (Goetzen?) who write in one language each.
• While I was still teaching I had to deliver a lecture on art and architecture, about which I had a rough idea due to how much I’ve wound up reading about Romanesque churches, but where some orientation seemed like a good idea, and so I fished out of the library the only likely-looking thing, Art of the Middle Ages by Janetta Rebold Benton.⁴ While this was up in the Currently reading… sidebar section there I had it linked to a fairly negative review by Joanna F. Ziegler, which describes it as, “a quite staid reiteration of the voluminous, but uninspiring, factual minutiae that has permeated the genre”.⁵ And, well, yes, it’s not deathless prose and does tend to take one or two exemplary objects or sites per trend, briefly explain them and then list all their siblings. But I’m still thinking about getting a copy, because what that tendency makes it is a volume to look things up in when you already know the basics. Inspiring read? No. Handbook with which to hit up Wikimedia Commons for high-class imagery? Absolutely. Its own plates are also rather lovely. And the final chapter on art in everyday life nearly makes up for the high-culture architectural concentration of much of the middle.
• And, lastly, I have a well-documented tendency on this blog towards protochronism. You may all remember the thirteenth-century notary called Catto whose authentication mark was a dog, well, this is from 906 and Vic:
  

  Scribal signature from Junyent, Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic segles IX i X, no. 37, by Teudila

  It’s not actually an authentication mark, just an elaboration for fun of a signum which began, long before, as a triple S with a double abbreviation bar drawn through it, meaning S[ub]s[crip]s[i], ‘I have signed’, but it is, nonetheless, a critter. And as you go through the Vic material you can find weirder and weirder ones, rabbits, chickens and some unidentifiable things we had probably best call zoomorphs, as well as artistic pen-drawn initials full of interlace. I don’t think these things are consistent per scribe, I think they’re just whimsy, but I wouldn’t like to rule out someone doing a study of them and proving me wrong.⁶

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1. H. Atsma, “Klöster und Mönchtum im Bistum Auxerre bis zum Ende des 6. Jahrhunderts” in Francia: Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte Vol. 11 (Sigmaringen 1983), pp. 1-96, quote from pp. 54-55.

2. Referring to, respectively, François Dolbeaux, “La vie en prose de Saint Marcel, Évêque de Die : Histoire du texte et édition critique”, ibid. pp. 97-130; J. Martindale, “The Kingdom of Aquitaine and the Dissolution of the Carolingian Fisc”, ibid pp. 131-189; and H.-W. Goetz, “Kirschenschutz, Rechtswahrung und Reform. Zu den Zielen um zum Wesen der frühen Gottesfriedensbewegung in Frankreich”, ibid. pp. 193-239.

3. Respectively J. L. Nelson, “Gender and Genre in Women Historians of the Early Middle Ages” in J.-P. Genet (ed.), L’historiographie médiévale en Europe : actes du colloque organisé par la Fondation européenne de la science au Centre de recherches historiques et juridiques de l’Université de Paris I du 29 mars au 1er avril 1989 (Paris 1991), pp. 149-163, and H.-W. Goetz, “On the Universality of Universal History”, ibid. pp. 247-261.

4. J. Rebold Benton, Art in the Middle Ages, World of Art (London 2002).

5. Joanna E. Ziegler, review of ibid. in The Historian Vol. 66 (Tampa 2004), pp. 179-180, quote from p. 179.

6. Miquel Sants Gros i Pujol, “Làmines” in Eduard Junyent i Subirà (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic, segles IX i X, ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (Vic 1980-96), làm. 22. Anyone wanting to work on this stuff probably ought to start with Rafael Conde Delgado de Molina and Josep Trenchs Odena, “Signos personales en las suscripciones altomedievales catalanas” in Peter Rück (ed.), Graphische Symbole in mittelalterlichen Urkunden. Beiträge zur diplomatischen Semiotik, Historische Hilfswissenschaften 3 (Sigmaringen 1986), pp. 443-452, which I have to admit I haven’t. Maybe in July.

I should have read this the moment I bought it, VII: what we need is more power

It’s being very hard to find time to write any substantive blog just now, though I have sufficient queued up that by the time me saying this finally emerges and you read these words this may no longer be true. Anyway, I haven’t quite finished praising Jennifer Davis and Michael McCormick’s The Long Morning of Medieval Europe yet, much though you may wish I had, and it’s time for another dose.

Part Four of the book is on government and power and this is, as Magistra observed when I started talking about this volume, one of the stronger parts of the volume. Janet Nelson, no less, spends a pellucid ten pages analysing a list of hostages and their captors who were to be brought to a royal meeting at Mainz, and produces from it a network of status and responsibility that is emblematic of the way that connection to the court brought both to those in power in the regions, and thus explains why people bothered with the whole kingdom thing one more time.¹

The Frankish noblewoman Dhuoda, from Wikimedia Commons and I don't know where before that

Then Matthew Innes talks about this same process with a focus on property, and picks up Dhuoda, two sets of Carolingian officials and the letters of Einhard to show how people got, were given or tried to lay hold of property and how connection to a greater power than them would help to do that. As you will be aware I think most to all of what Matthew writes is brilliant, and this is no exception; on the other hand I had a pre-print draft of this in 2005, so I have, you might say, learned to love it. It hasn’t changed a great deal but I like to think I had a slight effect on it.²

In between these two things, rather oddly, sits Jennifer Davis’s piece arguing that all this emphasis on locality and region is all very well but we mustn’t forget the centre, and having said as much she gets pretty solidly into the capitulary legislation and what it has to say about the actual running of the kingdom. This wouldn’t be much of a new direction were it not for the fact that she is quite post-modern, or at least post-Wormald, about her reading of the laws, accepting that they weren’t meant to impose uniformity; instead she argues that they were couched so as to allow for an almost infinite variety of local circumstances to be negotiated then and there. I don’t think you can go down this road without starting to see Carolingian legislation as an expression of an ideal, rather than a practice, and to be faintly surprised when it seems to actually be in use, but Davis won’t look in that direction and prefers to see an administrative state rather than an ideological one. I’m still not sure, but she uses her evidence well.³

A folio of the Capitulare de Villis, from Wikimedia Commons

Lastly Stuart Airlie, as it should be wherever Carolingian power is in discussion, wraps up , emphasising the communications that held the Empire together and demanding more comparison with other empires in an attempt to challenge and refine whatever we think is ‘Carolingian’ about all of this, rather than just, well, successful.⁴ As he says, if we can’t identify that properly any talk of change before, after or during the Carolingian era is decidedly questionable, to which I say, indeed and don’t we know it who work on the tenth and eleventh centuries and consider Charles the Fat still fairly early? So, well, I aim to help, in the long run, with this programme he throws into the air, but these articles will all help when I do.

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1. Janet L. Nelson, “Charlemagne and Empire” in Jennifer R. Davis & Michael McCormick (edd.), The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: new directions in early medieval studies (Aldershot 2008), pp. 223-234, with the key text given in translation as an appendix; if you want Jinty explaining the whole system, of course, you should read her “Kingship and Royal Government” in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History vol. II: c. 700-c. 900 (Cambridge 1995), pp. 383-430.

2. Matthew J. Innes, “Practices of Property in the Carolingian Empire” in Davis & McCormick, Long Morning, pp. 247-266.

3. Jennifer R. Davis, “A Pattern for Power: Charlemagne’s Delegation of Judicial Responsibilities”, ibid. pp. 235-246.

4. Stuart Airlie, “The Cunning of Institutions”, ibid. pp. 267-271.

Seminary VIII (a room packed with archaeologists)

You know, at the moment my readership actually goes down when I post something, whereas the longer I stay silent the healthier it gets. I’m not quite sure what goes on here, whether I’ve just reached search-engine critical mass or something. Hullo the new readers anyway. I shall risk driving you away by putting in more content, as I’m running badly behind.

On Wednesday 24th October the Institute of Historical Research’s Earlier Middle Ages Seminar took a short trip up the road to have a joint meeting with the University College London Institute of Archaeology. This is obviously the sort of thing that should happen more often, and indeed the speaker referenced a paper by Guy Halsall that pointed out how silly it was that these two seminars never met, as of 2003, though unfortunately I didn’t get a handout and Guy’s own webpages haven’t been updated since he moved to York, so I can’t give a further citation.¹ It was pointed out by Andrew Reynolds, who had organised the meeting (for which the archaeologists had generously shifted their usual meeting day), that ordinarily of course Guy had never been able to go to that seminar himself because he was usually teaching at the same time that it was on. Generally we all agreed that London is just too busy, which was easy to do given the hundred or so of us that were crammed into a room made for forty to sit in comfort.

But I’m digressing. What on earth led a hundred-plus academics to come and squeeze into a darkened room in UCL, you may be wondering, and the answer is that the speaker who was talking about Guy, historians and archaeologists was none other than Professor Dame Janet Nelson, or Jinty as most of us know her, and she was speaking to the title, “Spades and Lies? Interdisciplinary encounters”. Now Jinty’s worked with a good few archaeologists, and meanwhile has her own definite views on what’s useful and what isn’t in the study of the past, so it was clearly going to be worth hearing, and she didn’t disappoint, although she had warned me beforehand that it was going to be a rambling anecdotal piece. Well, so it was I guess, but every anecdote had a point as an example and Jinty’s own asides and self-deprecations make her an endearing speaker, especially when she has something definite to say but, you get the impression, isn’t sure whether you’ll take her seriously. What she had to say was largely a set of stories that, like St Bede with his Ecclesiastical History, aimed to give examples of interdisciplinary practice both bad and good,

For if history relates good things of good men, the attentive hearer is excited to imitate that which is good; or if it mentions evil things of wicked persons, nevertheless the religious and pious hearer or reader, shunning that which is hurtful and perverse, is the more earnestly excited to perform those things which he knows to be good…. (HE, Preface)

I can’t even attempt to reproduce the various stories that came out, but the upshot was that she feels that the two fields need to respect each other’s aims and our common ground a lot more. We’re all trying to do the same thing, she argued, and it doesn’t get us anywhere to denigrate the other approach when we should instead be trying to see what it can contribute to our understanding.

Thus, her title referred to an article by Philip Grierson that I reminded you all about a little while ago.² I didn’t mention this, but that article opens with the memorable quote, “It is said that the spade cannot lie, but it owes this merit in part to the fact that it cannot speak.” Philip then went on to stress how all archaeological evidence is subject to interpretation and that, really, people ought to be more careful with that then they often are, and so on. Jinty stressed that she was a great fan of Philip’s work and owed him a great deal (not least because he’d been one of her D.Phil. examiners!),³ but had to say that this was exactly the kind of attitude that she felt wasn’t helpful; mocking specialists from across the divide for how they use ‘your’ evidence is not the way forward. Of course, archaeology has moved on a lot since 1959, and meanwhile there exist far too many historians who’ve forgotten Philip’s warning as I was trying to point out, but it’s a fair enough point. Which is not to say that Jinty didn’t herself have some private gripes about some archaeologists’ use of documents, but some historians came in for mild censure too. Overall it was entertainment: but I must get hold of the handout as the depth of reference it seemed to involve would be a really useful thing to have handy when next I have to deal with the gap (which will be in January I think, though details are not yet on the web) between the text and the trench.

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* The roadsign image at the head of this post is the work of, and copyright to, Mary Chester-Kadwell. I’ll justify my use of it to her if she objects next time I see her as `fair use’ somehow or other, possibly by buying her drinks till she agrees, but I think she would prefer it if it didn’t get distributed from here, so please don’t be reusing it without her permission. A link to her web presence is concealed under the image.

1. Though if I had to guess, I’d imagine it would be his “Early medieval archaeology and history: some interdisciplinary problems and potentials for the twenty-first century” in Hans-Werner Goetz & Jorg Jarnut (eds), Mediävistik im 21. Jahrhundert. Stand und Perspektiven der internationalen und interdisziplinären Mittelalterforschung, MittelalterStudien des Instituts zur Interdisziplinären Erforschung des Mittelalters und seines Nachwirkens, Paderborn, 1 (Paderborn 2003), pp. 163-185, about which I am able to inform you thanks to the incomparable Regesta Imperii OPAC.

2. P. Grierson, “Commerce in the Dark Ages: a critique of the evidence” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th Series Vol. 9 (London 1959), pp. 123-140, repr. in idem, Dark Age Numismatics, Variorum Collected Studies 96 (London 1979), II.

3. As well as a faint horror of the passing of time during my lifetime, this fact again makes me marvel at Philip’s longevity. Jinty is retiring this year, 2007, two years later than she wanted to in 2005. I don’t know when she did her doctorate, but Philip, who examined it, had at least six papers out in 2001 and a last one in 2002, and was still firmly intending to get back to work, when he felt up to it, until very shortly before he died in early 2006, and was still collating reference material and reading new work for most of 2005. If Jinty had had her way she’d have retired before her doctoral examiner had stopped working. It’s not a bad run, you know?